Watch how governors will earn new revenue

By Mark Mutahi

County governments striving to find additional sources of revenue need to get more creative besides relying on charging neighbouring counties for the use of ‘their rivers’.

Not to be left behind in devising out-of-the-box solutions, one county is considering exploiting its extensive forest cover — by levying a fee to neighbouring counties for purification of air. With forests being a major source of oxygen, the county management has reasoned it’s sitting on a valuable resource that needs to be exploited.

Purified

“The air that those in neighbouring counties breathe is purified by the forest in our county. It’s time our county started to benefit from our valuable resource,” declared the county governor.

If the particular governor goes ahead to implement his idea, it will mean that Kenyans in other counties without adequate forest cover, and who are already overburdened by the high cost of living, will not be breathing easy any time soon.

Not to be seen as running short of ideas, yet another county has struck upon an interesting source of extra revenue — nectar. Being the county with the highest number of flower farms per square kilometer, the county governor has figured that its nectar is a precious commodity worth charging for.

“Lots of bees from neighbouring counties visit our county for nectar. We will put in place a mechanism for ensuring that we identify the county of origin of each bee and we will then send an invoice to the various counties where the bees originated from each time they come for nectar,” the governor is quoted as saying.

“We can’t just allow ‘visiting bees’ to come here and suck on our nectar and then go away without paying for it,” he sneered.

Another county government has also put its thinking cap on and is considering exploiting the opportunities offered by cloud computing. The county executive committee member for Information Technology has said that, his county will charge other counties for use of its ‘cloud’.

“It is no secret that our county has the most cloud cover in the whole country. Most of the cloud computing resources are thus in our county and it is time our people got to enjoy the monetary benefits accruing from the use of this abundant natural resource,” the executive member for IT said.

Telegram

When questioned further by journalists whether he understood what ‘cloud computing’ is he, shot them back an angry look and threatened to kick them out of the room if they continued with their controversial line of questioning. He also accused members of the press of having their judgment clouded by jealousy because they hailed from counties without much cloud cover.

But at the end of the press conference, when requested by journalists to give his email address for follow-up interviews, he grinned sheepishly before admitting that he didn’t have an email address.

 “Email isn’t safe anymore, what with the Chinese hacking into even highly sophisticated and secure US systems. Everyone should feel free to send me a fax or even better yet, a telegram. It’s faster!” he said without batting an eyelid.